Talking Tin and other Rustbelt Ruminations

 

Talking Tin and other Rustbelt Ruminations 

Tilted House

The Laughing West Virginian

Produce Man

Just Smile

Dog Faced Man

Man in Yellow

Mill

By Tom Wachunas

“Found objects, chance creations, ready-mades… abolish the separation between art and life. The commonplace is miraculous if rightly seen.”  - Charles Simic

“Every normal human being (and not merely the 'artist') has an inexhaustible store of buried images in his subconscious, it is merely a matter of courage or liberating procedures ... of voyages into the unconscious, to bring pure and unadulterated found objects to light.”  - Max Ernst

“It’s not where you take things from—it’s where you take them to.”— Jean-Luc Godard

 And this, from artist  Robert Villamagna: “I am very passionate about working with found materials, especially those items that show use, wear, and rust. I love stuff with character…I’m giving that discarded piece of metal, or that old object, a new life, a different life…For me, walking through a flea market is like walking through a well-stocked art materials store. The flea market is my palette.

 

EXHIBIT: Mixed-media assemblages, found objects/metal collages by Robert Villamagna, at THE GALLERY SPACE – on view to August 30, 2025 / curated by Priscilla Roggenkamp / located in two retail spaces, NEST (open Mon.- Sat. 10-6 and Sun. 11-4) and FRANCIS JEWELERS (open Mon.-Fri. 9-5), in ‘The Market Place’ shopping center, 1800 West State Street, ALLIANCE, Ohio

https://robertvillamagna.com/

 

   And here’s yet another sniveling apology for a late art report from this  wandering wordnerd. Anyway, first order of business: a laudacious THANK YOU to the highly accomplished textile artist and musician, Priscilla Roggenkamp, for curating a new art exhibit venue called The Gallery Space, located in Alliance.

   Featured in this soon to be concluded exhibit is the prolific mixed media artist, Robert Villamagna, who grew up in the Ohio River rustbelt. The  artworks that he creates in his West Virginia studio are delightfully vibrant constructions utilizing, among other elements, repurposed lithographed metals (‘tins’), found objects, and vintage photographs.

   His “stuff with character” exudes a distinctly narrative spirit in the form of collaged emblems, labels, logos and insignias, often accompanied by symbolic faces and caricatures that seem to pop out of printed texts. Villamagna’s mementos are much more than random juxtapositions of flea market flotsam or found vintage junk. These souvenirs are truly scintillating and otherwise intriguing evocations of bygone blue collar days in the rustbelt, before it became… well, too rusty to remember.

   Next up at The Gallery Space: Paintings by Christopher Triner, with opening reception on Thursday, September 4, 5 – 7pm.

Shall We Continue?

 

 Shall We Continue? 

We're Finally Landing

Mother Tree

I Go to See the Place Once More

Interloper

Torchlight

By Tom Wachunas  

“Contemplation is at once the existential appreciation of our own ‘nothingness’ and of the divine reality, perceived by ineffable spiritual contact within the depths of our own being.” – Thomas Merton

“We leave something of ourselves behind when we leave a place, we stay there, even though we go away. And there are things in us that we can find again only by going back there.” – Pascal Mercier

EXHIBIT: Both Sides of the Brain – Paintings by Kit Palencar, at Strauss Studios Gallery/ 236 Walnut Avenue NE, downtown Canton, Ohio / THROUGH AUGUST 23, 2025 / viewing hours Wed.-Fri. 11-6, Sat 12-5, CLOSING RECEPTION ON AUGUST 23, 5 – 9pm

 

https://artwach.blogspot.com/2025/02/life-at-corner-of-now-and-not-yet.html

   He’s baaack…For the second time this year, Canton viewers can embrace the art of Kit Palencar. In February, I saw his marvelous solo exhibit at Canton Museum of Art (CMA). You can click on the above hyperlink in case you want to read my thoughts about that experience. While this collection at Straus Studios Gallery does include several pieces from the CMA exhibit, the majority are other and newer works, though certainly no less compelling infatuating. What I wrote in February remains apropos here: Palencar’s paintings are profoundly soul-probing visions.  Constituting an eloquent object lesson in contemplation, they are poignant, mystifying and illuminating all at once.

   Contemplating what? Palencar tells us, "The left and right sides of the brain—often accepted as separate domains—merge in these works to form a unified, complex narrative about our existence and inevitable mortality…I encourage viewers to confront the tension of our human nature against the scientific definitions of what nature is. Nature does not resist its cycles… Through these paintings and drawings, I aim to question how we, as conscious beings, engage with our own impermanence. Can the cerebral and the organic find harmony? This exhibition invites viewers to witness that tension, and perhaps, to feel at home in it."

    There’s a painting in this exhibit which reminds me of doing what I do with much of my time, why I do it, and where I often do it. The painting is titled, interestingly enough, I Go To See the Place Once More.

    And so I’m baaack, in an art gallery. Seeing once more. I’m riveted by that guy immersed in an eerie glow of greenish light looking at what might be a smart screen (or a smart SCREAM?). With his mouth slightly agape, he appears gripped, surprised. Maybe even a bit alarmed. Might this be an OMG moment? A reveille? Is it a call to tension, or simply whole-minded attention?   

     Palencar’s paintings ask us to think about thinking by bridging the gap between our cerebral hemispheres. A marriage of left to right, as it were. The left hemisphere of my brain, where logic and reason supposedly reign supreme, accepts that the artist is embracing the inevitability of natural life’s impermanence. Mortality. Ok, death. However, that ever-present interloper - the right hemisphere of my brain - breaks in and incites an emotional dialogue with all sorts of suggestions and questions, including a memory of God’s somber words to Adam in Genesis 3:19 (which Palencar cites in his statement), “…for dust you are and to dust you will return.” If that’s all there is to our story, such a promise could conceivably create an inconsolable existential angst. Tension, to be sure.

   Yet as long as we’re on the subject of conversing with God about nature and death, what do we think about these words (from Romans 8:22-23)? “We know that the whole creation has been groaning, as in the pains of childbirth right up to the present time. Not only so, but we ourselves, who have the firstfruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly as we wait eagerly for our adoption as sons, the redemption of our bodies.”

   Another promise, another truth. For relief, for release. Can we think of death, then, as not a meaningless dreadful end, but a necessary portal to glorious eternal life? From dust to divine destiny. It’s…inevitable. And with that, I feel perfectly at home.

   Thank you again, Kit Palencar. Your art is an exquisitely epiphanic conversation starter.